WoW. SWTOR. Guild Wars?

19Jul

I’ve been itching to blog about something, anything, for over a month now but couldn’t really find a worthy topic to do it on. Today I decided I had a decent enough topic to talk about that it would be worth my time to go ahead and write it down and send it out to the masses, so here it goes.

Today I’m going to cover a little bit of what’s been going on lately in my own gaming world and how that has impacted the blog, and I wanted to address some of the issues that I see right now that will impact my gaming (and by extension my blogging) in the near future.

State of the Blog
When I was playing WoW it was easy to come up with a new topic because there was always a new class, spec or playstyle that I could write about and by the time I got through all of the choices there would be a new expansion or patch that would change things enough that I needed to start all over again. Then SWTOR came along and stole my heart away from WoW and I found myself in a world where people no longer cared about reading leveling guides or getting ideas about how to play a certain class.

It has really blown my mind how large of a difference there is in the mindset of WoW players vs. SWTOR players as a general playerbase. I never would have suspected that people playing SWTOR would have so little desire to read about things like leveling guides and theorycrafting after spending years playing WoW where that was so prevalent.

I love writing leveling guides, but when you put so much effort into writing something that nobody uses, it’s hard to keep that fire burning. In the last 30 days, I’ve had ten times as many people look at a WoW leveling guide that I wrote over 2 years ago that is completely outdated than I do my most popular SWTOR post. I was not expecting so large a difference to be there, and I was not prepared for it from a blogging perspective.

Blogging about SWTOR has left me very unsure of how to proceed. Though I certainly still have readers who come for information on SWTOR, WoW remains by far the more popular topic for blogging. I have some ideas for other topics that I can write about, but writing guides is what I enjoy the most and it has left me in an odd position.

Word of Warcraft
The game that started the blogging for me is now a thing of the past. My wife and I are going to give Mists one more shot to see if it can rekindle our interest, but after seeing our reactions when we first tried out the beta, I have very low expectations.

In December 2011, my wife and I were both having fun with WoW. I was enjoying it more than my wife was, but we were both still having fun playing our characters and hanging out with the guild. We stopped playing once we tried the SWTOR beta and were unexpectedly blown away.

After a few months we made an attempt to get back into WoW, but there was such a huge contrast between WoW and SWTOR that leveling up in WoW felt incredibly static and boring. It was like someone flipped a light switch but instead seeing a whole new world open up before our eyes, the light was turned off and the world felt cold and lonely. Questing suddenly lost all of its appeal when you saw that there was nothing but a little window filled with text and a little button at the bottom to accept it. After playing SWTOR for just a few months there was such a drastic difference in the questing that WoW just couldn’t hold up.

As you likely are aware, I play these games because I love to level all kinds of different characters, and when one of the primary sources of experience lost all of its appeal it had a really negative impact on how I view the game as a whole.

If that one last shot at MoP still fails to impress us, then we’re going to be done with WoW for good.

Since it is by far my most frequently read post, I will keep the Heirloom Guide up to date through the releases of MoP, but that’s probably where I will stop updating it and hand it over to someone else.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Right now SWTOR is still incredibly fun, and my wife and I are both having a blast with the game. For the most part, players are still having a good time. Players who focus on endgame, both PvE and PvP, have their complaints but overall it’s still going on strong. I think that SWTOR still has a bright future and will be around for years to come with a decent playerbase.

However, there’s a lot of controversy going on right now in the social and development side of the game. The biggest problem right now is all of the layoffs that have happened with EA/Bioware which has caused a lot of discussion all across the board. Even people who aren’t connected to social sites and news outlets all day long know about these layoffs and it has a lot of people worried about the future of the game, enough so that many people are starting to look at other games to flock (back) to.

There’s also the whole Free to Play issue that makes me want to smash my head into a brick wall every time it comes up. This might even be a bigger issue than the layoffs since going F2P would have a direct impact on how the game proceeds in the future and people are either for or against F2P as a concept that such a move would have an immediate result on the number of players. Layoffs will have a potential impact when/if we see a SWTOR expansion, but until then they could fire 90% of their staff and it would have no impact on the play experience.

These two issues, along with others that aren’t big enough to speak of here, are having a profound impact on the social aspect of this game. No matter how much you might enjoy playing the game, if you’re active in social networks where a large number of players are present or if you’re active in the bloggosphere then you’re constantly surrounded by negativity towards the game. Even when you’re having a blast playing it, there’s so much negativity surrounding it that it’s almost hard to still enjoy it. You almost have to escape into the game to get away from all the negativity being directed at it. It’s a bit ridiculous, honestly.

Though we’re still enjoying SWTOR a great deal, I have to be honest her in stating that I fear for the longevity of my guilds, at least in so far as SWTOR itself is concerned. I have no doubt that my guilds will maintain their bonds from one game to another, but I do worry that either the aura of negativity or possible changes such as going F2P will ware away on the membership overtime enough that people will leave the game. I’ve seen it in guild leadership in every SWTOR guild that I’ve been in, and once the leaders start to fall away it’s only a matter of time before the flock starts to drift apart. I don’t mention it to encourage or justify such behavior, but rather to bring up the point that it is a personal concern.

I have every intention of continuing to play SWTOR. At the very least, I hope to be in it until I’ve seen every class’s story from the perspective of both genders and both light and dark alignments. I think the writers of SWTOR have done a fantastic job with the game, and I am eager to see the extent of their work.

Guild Wars 2
Until last night I had almost no interest in Guild Wars 2. Though people have been talking about the game for months, literally everything that I had seen on twitter or in blog posts about the game said that this game was focused on PvP. While I happen to love PvP, my wife hates it; and since I mostly play with her I had pretty well written this game off.

As the thoughts I just shared in the SWTOR section above started to occur to me yesterday, I decided to take a closer look at GW2 and see what PvE content it had to offer. Some of the folks on Twitter rallied to the cause and shared information about the game’s PvE content, and I was very surprised to see how much PvE content existed in the game after hearing so much about the game’s PvP and absolutely nothing on the PvE side.

There was one person in particular on twitter, @Manglehaft who shared a lot of really great information with us. In particular he shared CaraEmm‘s profile which has six great videos discussing the PvE content and things about the game in general. He also shared these two videos: ArenaNet’s MMO Manifest and Guild Wars 2: 60 Reasons. I found the videos from CaraEmm to be the most informative and useful overall, though I will warn you that he has quite an accent and can be a bit hard to understand at times.

We also found another video that was fairly good for the sake of comparison if you’ve played WoW: GW2 vs WoW. It doesn’t bash the two together to tell you why one is better than the other, it gives an actual comparison of how some things work in one game versus how they work in the other.

From what I’ve seen and read over the last 24 hours looks like GW2 offers most (not all) of the features that I love about SWTOR, takes my favorite concepts from Rift, and combines that with bits and pieces of what I loved about WoW and then smashed them all into one. They also removed the concept of grinding, removed race/class combination restrictions, did away with the monthly subscription fee, and did all of that without sacrificing graphics. Actual gameplay will be the true test, but in less than a day I’ve gone from completely dismissing to anxiously awaiting.

We haven’t played GW2 yet, but I did get a key for the beta weekend starting in a couple of days. If we find that we do enjoy playing this game, then there’s a good chance that I’ll do at least some blogging about GW2. Whether or not there turns out to be a solid reader base for it will determine how frequently I write about it, similar to what has happened with SWTOR.

Where to Next?
To recap (tl;dr):

WoW: MoP gets one more chance to impress, or we’re finished w/ WoWSWTOR: I love it, but community/social aspects have me worriedGW2: out of the blue, excited and looking forward to the upcoming beta weekend

The readership for SWTOR blogs really surprised me, so I’m anxious to see how the Guild Wars 2 community is going to look at blogging. Maybe my writing style and chosen topics weren’t a good fit for SWTOR and it was just an odd duck in the gaming world, or maybe times are just changing and it’s time for me to get with the program.

I’ve also had a lot of fun playing Diablo III and Starcraft 2 lately, so maybe I’ll venture into writing about those a bit as well. Who knows, maybe I’m meant to be a general gaming blogger rather than a specific game. I’m not sure what the future holds for me just yet, but I hope to keep you along for the ride wherever it might take me.

Like this:

Related

18 responses to “WoW. SWTOR. Guild Wars?”

Alana

July 19, 2012 at 4:29 PM

I agree with all that you said. I feel like we’re really at a “wait and see” kind of period with SWTOR and my guild feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. It’s hard for me because I never experienced anything quite like this in WoW. I was in large guilds that stayed large or became part of another guild. Perhaps that is what is in the future. Regardless, I have several people that I play SWTOR with and we are all really enjoying playing the game together, so there’s that. I had nothing left in WoW but 3 level 85’s and memories, so that’s not something I’ll look back into. As for GW2 I thought the PVP thing at first too, but I when I found out that wasn’t all there was to it, I was interested. I got stuck and frustrated in the last beta and was too busy with SWTOR to continue. I will try it again this weekend and decide if I’m going to buy it. Thanks for all those links!

I’m glad you’re taking a look at GW2. It seems to be more of the kind of game that you’re looking for, with a good balance between your interests and Fyn’s – the PvP part interests me, but there are system questions (I don’t think there’s a Mac client?) and I’m still invested in WoW.

I’m not really playing on Durotan anymore; mostly moved ally over to Medivh, and horde on Drenden. There’s a discount on server transfers this weekend, so I should decide if I’m going to save a few bucks and move some folks around or if I’m going to leave them be and see what happens to AF/FF. It’s certainly easier with BattleTags, but green text is nice.

Since I just got into it I don’t know enough to confirm/deny the presence of a Mac client, but since it’s a common enough question in general I’ll see if I can verify that. The PvP was very interesting during my limited exposure. Being completely PvP viable at level 1 was totally new.

Having recently played through leveling on wow for like… I dunno, the 13th time, I can tell you what I did differently on my 13th toon that made it different than any toon I’ve done before and brought the fun back into the game for me.

I slowed down.

I keep seeing posts from people in WoW about how they took toon A from 1-85 in 1.5 days or some crazy low /played time, and I guess thats ok if you want to play a max level char. After all, the end game is where the game begins right? A lot of people have that idea, and its not wrong, but it’s not right either.

There is plenty to enjoy in the wow leveling process post cataclysm. The zones were redesigned. The story was updated. The quests are interesting. And the rewards are great… almost too great.

Lets step back a bit. You like SWTOR because the leveling process feels interactive and fun. Your characters each get their own little personal story that unfolds before them. I know, I did a smuggler and an inquisitor. I got involved with those story lines. I felt vested in those characters because it felt like the world revolved around them. But then I got to the end of the story and it all fell apart.

Lets be clear, in my opinion the only differences between the storylines and interactivity of the world of warcraft and star wars is the fact that the star wars story practically forces itself into your head by the way of fully voice acting everything, even if its the same random jumble. They gave your character a voice, and its fun to make yourself say some things. It feels more alive because the dialogue is two ways, not just one way. You have friends forced upon you (companions) and they seem to take on lives of their own through their own mini stories. And I have to say, all those things are great fun, but for me, when the story was over, the story was over, and I didn’t really get a satisfying ending because I got to ilum and its suddenly “Yeah, do these same things over and over and… you’ll need a big group you can’t get to do it.”

Mind you, I was one of the first on my server to hit the level cap, so I felt very alone at the time, and I understand that server transfers have come to bolster populations and that there is now a random group finder.

Wow on the other hand doesn’t play you movies. It doesn’t force you to do the storylines. You can pretend the world is a static place with NPCs with exclamation marks and question marks over their heads and they reward xp so you can move on to the next group of NPCs with exclamation marks and question marks over their heads.

Now I’m going to say something that may offend you here, but I mean no offense by it, but leveling guides kindof ruin WoW.

See, the idea that you need someone to tell you where to go next or what to do for the most efficient experience, to me ruins the individual joy of exploration and wonder. It turns wow from a journey into a “lets see how fast we can get to the endgame where it all matters” experience, and that’s just selling the game short. You’re taking shortcuts, and just getting to the endgame and wondering why you got there and what to do now? Luckily, unlike Star Wars, WoW has done a great job of helping the inexperienced player into the end game, so people tend to stick around.

That’s the difference. SWTOR plays movies and entertains you, while WoW makes you read a book. Most people skip the book in WoW and want to get to the end game, whereas most people want to watch the movie in SWTOR and see how their story plays out for themselves. This, inherently, is why I think your SWTOR guides are not nearly as popular as your WoW guides. For better or for worse, people are content to find their own way in SWTOR and they are eager to get to the end game in WoW.

I enjoyed SWTOR, but when I was done, I was done. It really felt like a bioware game to me in that once I was done with the story, the game was over. And I think that’s why it doesn’t work as an MMO for a lot of people. I went back to WoW.

And like you, when I went back to WoW I felt like the game was missing that sense of story. So, as I mentioned at the begining of this post, I slowed down.

There’s a great feature in WoW that lets you lock your XP. I started a new hunter. I already had an 85 hunter, but I wanted a new one, a fresh one. Perhaps because I wanted a companion on my long journey.

I did not use heirlooms. The story started fresh, and I did something I haven’t done since I was very new to WoW…. I *read* the quest text. I slowed down. I got into the story. I watched every cutscene and read every quest text and bothered to understand exactly *why* I was running out to kill 10 rats. And know who was that crazy demon in the road. I wanted to know the story behind the zones so I read them all. And as soon as I got level 10, I locked my XP and did every quest I could while locked at xp. Then I unlocked my XP and got to level 15 via pvp, then locked again until I exhausted the story.

I’m 84 now, with 30 days played. I’ll hit 85 this weekend probably, as I’m currently melting faces in PvP. When you lock XP and quest all of Twilight Highlands before going into PvP, you end up with some serious gear. ;)

But therein lies the difference I think. WoW is a book, SWToR is a movie. Its so much easier to get into the story of SWToR, so its appealing, so the leveling guides don’t work. WoW will make you work to get the story, it makes you force yourself to be patient. It makes you make up some of your own story yourself. Your character doesn’t get a voice provided by some actor, you have to make it up in your head.

But to me, that’s all right. I hate this phrase, but: It is what it is. And far be it from me to tell you your wrong for liking SWTOR, its all down to personal preference. But for me, slowing down WoW made me enjoy it so much more. Perhaps I didn’t give SWTOR the same chance, but I just felt that my story there was done.

The leveling guides that you’re referring to do have a negative impact on the game from my personal experience. However, that’s not the type of guide that I write. I don’t tell people where to go to maximize their leveling speed, my guides are written to teach people how to play their characters in a fun, effective manner. I talk about how you use different spells, which ones work well for certain specs and which do not, and give suggestions for spending your talent points. My guides aren’t written to help you level quickly, but rather to understand your character and give you ideas of how to play them effectively and to enjoy the leveling process.

Maybe everyone who sees that I’ve posted a leveling guide gets that same picture you did, that I’m telling everyone how to rush through the game rather than helping them understand the class better. That could be the problem, I suppose. Or maybe it’s that so much of the SWTOR playerbase has the SW background rather than a general MMO background and don’t even know that such information is available.

When I tried out the MoP beta I jumped right into brand new content that I had never seen before with a Pandaren Monk. I play games for the sake of leveling, not to power level. I like to experience the growth of the leveling process as end game means nothing at all to me regardless of the game. Even starting something that was brand new, while I did enjoy doing the quests that were in that brand new starting zone, the lack of voice acting had a huge impact on how much I enjoyed playing it. I took the time to read all of the text for every quest I came across, and I found that taking the time to read it when it really didn’t matter at all, was just boring to me. I found myself going back to my old method of accepting the quest w/o reading it, looking on the map to see where I needed to do things and then getting it done. Reading story that I knew wouldn’t matter after I reached level 10 took away the enjoyment and replaced it with boredom. It wasn’t just the lack of voice acting in and of itself, but what that added to the experience. At the end of the day, both systems are little more than a chore list, but I felt that WoW shoved that in my face where SWTOR added more to the mix.

One of the big differences between WoW and SWTOR is that WoW’s story isn’t about the characters, it’s about the world. In SWTOR the only story that matters is your own; there are plenty of little side stories to get involved with on every planet, but as you progress from level 1 to level 50 the overall story is your own. Since WoW doesn’t have a story that matters beyond what’s in the world itself, and few zones tie into any other zone, it’s a world full of interesting but overall pointless stories. So rather than reading a book, it’s more like reading a series of short stories that all take place in the same setting.

I don’t need to have my character be the center of attention in order to enjoy a game, but if I’m going to get into a story then I want the story to be worth my investment in it. SWTOR added something to the leveling process that really appealed to me by making the quests meaningful and entertaining where every quest offered conversations that further expanded my character’s personality, and going back to WoW that was removed which left the world feeling dead. Before SWTOR I never had a problem with the fact that I was doing Kill X of Y quests all day long, but now that I’ve seen how much fun you can have when there’s more to it than that, going back to it is very dull to me.

End game grinding exists in almost every MMO, and that’s something that I have zero interest in. Guild Wars claims that they’ve done away with grinding, and I’m very interested to see what their solution is. If it turns out that it’s really just another form of grinding, then I’ll do what I’ve done in every other game, including SWTOR, which is leave that character alone and go roll myself another alt.

Well then I apologize for my comment about leveling guides. I admit I haven’t read them, because I don’t read stuff like that on principle, I like to explore things out for my own. That being said, I see your point, and from everything I’m getting out of the beta, I don’t think MoP will be for you. The quests are still about the world and they’re still leaving your own development up to yourself. You can steamroll to the end game or enjoy the way there, totally up to you. There are no choices you get to make really that impact the world.

I did like that about SWTOR, that things you did felt like they had meaning, and like I said, I did enjoy it the first time going through. Its just, with a lack of end-game content and goals there’s only so much I can enjoy. I’ve often remarked to people that SWTOR felt like a fine RPG, along the lines of KotoR 1 & 2. But like KotoR 1 and 2, when I get to the end, I’m just done.

I never really think of WoW’s end game as a grind exactly. I guess it depends on what you’re going for. A year or so ago when my guild killed Sinestra for the first time during Tier 11, it didn’t feel like the end of a grind, it felt like a glorious victory over the toughest challenge the game offered. The encounters are so finely tuned that it felt like it meant something. We got to walk around town calling ourselves Dragonslayers, something that not a lot of people, even to this day, get to do (I still carry the title).

So that’s what SWTOR lacked for me, a real, meaty challenge, something that galvanized a team. Something that made you feel like a badass when you finally did it. But I guess you’re right, that only a small percentage of people are interested in stuff like that. Maybe that’s why they’re adding pokemon to WoW ;)

I’ve gotten 2 characters to level 50 in SWTOR, and both of them are essentially retired now because end game hold no potential for growth beyond new gear which I really couldn’t care less about.

SWTOR’s biggest failing was that they thought everyone would love enjoying the story so much that they would take their time with it and then because of Legacy perks they would go and roll another character to experience it all over again. Apparently it never occurred to them that end game was just as important as the journey. Personally, I’m fine with the current end game because I don’t care about it in the first place, but they really should have known better given the current market. End game might not matter to me, but overall it’s actually the most important thing for a game to focus on if you want to keep players engaged. They failed at endgame for both PvE and PvP, and that may very well be the key factor to the game’s downfall, and even once they fix it I think there are too many titles coming out or getting expansions for them to win the playerbase back. They’ll likely stay in the 500k-1mil subscriber area from here on out.

With WoW, it’s always a grind to get your gear built up to take on the raid, then the raiding itself is fun while you’re taking things down, but then once you’ve beat the bosses you’re back to a grind on alts so that they can raid bosses you have on farm, or you’re grinding reputations for pets/mounts/transmog gear. The only time you’re not grinding in WoW’s endgame is when you’re attempting progressive raiding, and that can only last for so long either because you beat it or because your guild members give up on it. Then it’s waiting game time until the next raid comes along where the cycle starts all over again.

Heh, your comments about the negativity in regards to SWTOR really struck a chord with me. It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about writing about myself. It can really get you down, but at the same time it’s almost humorously bizarre how rooting for a game made by freaking EA can make you an underdog in certain circles.

While I understand that not getting the same amount of page views hurts, I’m not sure this is down to SWTOR fans not liking levelling guides or rather WoW still being WoW and having millions of players (who look things up on the internet). I mean, my own WoW blog, which was purely opinion pieces and thus didn’t have any guides people would still be looking up later on, hasn’t been updated in nearly five months and still gets half as many visitors a day as my SWTOR blog, which I update multiple times a week. It’s just one of those things.

I did some more thinking on it, and I think you’ve made a strong point between the difference in numbers. I do remember a time when getting that many readers on my WoW guides brought a smile to my face, so maybe I’m being unfairly critical of my own work from unreasonable expectations. I need to take that into consideration and see if I need to rethink that.

SWTOR has a much better pace of leveling than WoW post-Cataclysm. I’d agree with Aggrazel that you should take your time leveling, but the game doesn’t let you! The leveling experience in Cataclysm was trivialised, not reborn. Yes they changed the world so it was in some parts a new experience. But they messed up on the leveling speed so you can’t finish zones realistically without out-leveling content.

Slightly ironic me posting that under Shintar’s comment on negativity but this is my biggest beef of all in any game. I was part of a social leveling guild for 4 years in WoW. But Cataclysm made leveling as a group an absolute joke because of the linearity of questing and the extensive use of ‘vehicle’ mechanics.

Fun small group content is something that SWTOR does better than most games in the market actually. With the free trial now available I was hoping to get my partner to finally try the game, if he were playing I’d probably be able to get my friend from launch days back into it as well.

I don’t mind the increased leveling speed, personally, but I do know that it has been a serious concern voiced time and time again on twitter by a large number of people. I would be happy with slower leveling, and I would be happy with faster leveling. I just enjoy the process of leveling and speed isn’t important to me.

I do wish they had a better solution though. Some people like to level and explore everything, so slowing it down would be good. Others hate the leveling process and would like to be able to simply create level 85 characters once they’ve leveled one of them. It would be nice if they gave us more options so that everyone could play the way that they wanted to play.

I can’t believe I missed this post! I’ll have to scroll back through Twitter and shoot you a RT or something, as I love your work and usually support you and Jenny any chance that I get.

Anywho.

I feel like I’m kind of in the same boat as you and many others are, in that the game that I have come to enjoy the most lately (Magic) has a very different community than the one that I am used to (WoW). I maintain that I have never blogged or done a podcast solely for the numbers, but some part of me does worry that I would lose readers or lose influence or what have you by making the jump to writing about a topic that people typically don’t read about unless you have some experience or clout under your belt.

I went through this when I started writing about Rift. It made me feel like nobody was reading my work and like I was doing it solely for myself. I think everyone wants to feel listened to or acknowledged, in some way. Personally, I write to be relateable and to offer an “I’ve been there” type voice. It’s hard to be that or to offer that when your audience is so small that people aren’t stopping by enough to appreciate your writing. It’s tough.

Experiencing the different communities surrounding each game has been very odd. When I tried Rift I didn’t see a whole lot of difference between it and WoW community-wise beyond the sometimes open hatred a lot of fans had for each other between the two titles. It didn’t prepare me well for the difference between WoW and SWTOR communities. I’m still surprised to see such a huge gap in what people are interested in reading about between the two.

Numbers have never been the purpose of my blogging, but they do serve well in judging reader interest, so I check them fairly often to see how I’m doing and to get an idea of what kind of information people are looking for to influence what I write about next. The numbers don’t drive me, but they do help me navigate the road ahead.

One of the best gaming systems I’ve seen from a pure “play your way” perspective is the AA slider in EQ2. Sure you may or may not agree with the concept of AAs for character customisation but the idea of giving players power over their leveling speed is genius. Hard to think what they could do in WoW the same, maybe a slider to transfer XP into faction based on whichever tabard you are wearing? That way you can slow down leveling without simply losing some of the XP in the process…

Getting a bit off topic here, but I would love to see a system similar in general concept to what SWTOR has done, where you have a character level, legacy level, social level, and valor level (pvp) but instead of getting some experience into each group as you do things in the world you had certain percentages that you could assign to each one on the fly. You could go with the default setup of having 90% of your experience go towards progressing your character, and 8% into legacy and 1% to both social and valor, but you could also customize it to send 80% to Legacy for unlocking account-wide perks, 15% to character experience, 4% social, and 1% valor.

That exact system wouldn’t really fit within the scope of the idea, but conceptually I think it would be at least interesting to play a game that had different things that you could choose to put your experience towards so if you felt like you were progressing too quickly level-wise you could allocate your rewards differently so that you could still experience the content at-level where it’s challenging without completely missing out on the rewards. Instead of getting more powerful on that character, you’re unlocking other perks, vanity rewards, or even converting some of your experience into currency.